


Once a Year

by Sholio



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Birthday Party, Families of Choice, Feels, Gen, Healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 16:27:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17470991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: The Lieberman kids plan a birthday party for Frank.





	Once a Year

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maplemood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/gifts).



David's text had been ... cryptic. It just said, _Could you come over this afternoon? The kids have something they want to give you._

And he'd texted back _Sure,_ because what else was he going to do, be a total dipshit about it? Though he'd be lying if he said he hadn't thought about making up some kind of excuse. The part he got stuck on was the part where it was the kids. He could deal with David and Sarah thinking he was an asshole, but he got stuck on lying to kids. (Unless David was lying about the kid thing. But, while Frank knew David was capable of a lot of things, the one thing he wouldn't do was lie about his kids.)

Frank hadn't dropped completely out of touch, but he also hadn't seen much of the Liebermans since things had settled down. He got occasional invitations from David, and more rarely from Sarah, wanting him to come over to dinner or for some neighborhood thing or whatever. He usually thanked them and said he was busy. Once, he'd had lunch with David, mostly because David had tracked him down and ambushed him outside one of Curtis's meetings.

It wasn't that he was avoiding them. Not really. It was just that he didn't see why it was a good idea to drag a happy family like theirs into his orbit. Frank and the Liebermans had moved the same way for awhile, and then they hadn't, and that was that.

And yet, here he was on their doorstep, and it was three in the afternoon on a Saturday, and he stood there for a long time before he rang the doorbell.

There was a flurry of some kind of activity inside the house, and then the door was yanked open and there was Leo with a smudge of flour on her nose. "Frank!" she exclaimed, and her face split into a million-watt smile. "I mean, Pete! Hi!"

David appeared behind her, still looking scruffy as shit even though he wasn't living in a bunker anymore, with a beer in his hand. "Hey, Frank," he said, and ruffled Leo's hair. "You want to come in, since my daughter won't invite you?"

"I was getting to that!" Leo protested, ducking out from under his hand.

"Beer?" David asked as Frank came in.

"Kinda early for me." He'd been keeping pretty strict rules about that. He'd seen, especially in Curtis's group, how other guys came back from Afghanistan and disappeared into a bottle and never came out.

"Special occasion," David declared, pushing a beer into his hand. "Anyway, you're gonna want one. Trust me. Zach ... where's Zach?"

"Here!" Zach said, appearing out of the kitchen. "Hi, Pete! I mean, Frank -- I mean, Pete."

"You guys can call me Frank, when it's just us," Frank said, unaccountably embarrassed. "So your dad said you had something for me." He glanced at David, a look that promised payback if this was some sort of setup for something.

"We do!" Leo said, and took his hand, her small fingers closing over his gun-callused killer's hand. "Frank, c'mon. It's in the backyard. It _is_ in the backyard, _right?"_ she demanded, glaring at her brother.

"Your mom's seeing to it, so of course it's in the backyard," David said, herding the kids through the house like a scruffy sheepdog. "C'mon, Frank."

Frank came because he didn't have much choice, especially with Leo tugging on him. "You gonna give me a heads up here, or something?" he asked David, who looked a little too cheerful.

"I'm just going to tell you this was entirely the kids' idea," David said, which didn't exactly make him less nervous. "They masterminded it from start to finish -- Zach, get the door, would you?"

Zach opened the back door. Frank hadn't been in the Liebermans' backyard much (or basically ever). It was a tiny little suburban backyard, hemmed with fences, with a playhouse that looked like it dated back to when the kids were a lot younger and a half-assed flower garden next to the back door.

There was also a picnic table with a fluttering red-and-white checked cloth and Sarah Lieberman bending over it, putting out paper cups.

"Mom!" Zach yelped. "Where's the sign?"

"It kept blowing over," Sarah said. "We aren't having a sign." She smiled at Frank. "Hi, Frank."

"Hi, ma'am," Frank said, automatically. He gave the table a quizzical look, then David.

"The kids wanted to throw you a birthday party," David said.

"Dad!" the kids wailed together, united in despair, and Leo added, "It's a surprise! You spoiled the surprise!"

Unsurprised was definitely not an accurate description of Frank's state of mind at the moment. "It's not," he began, and then looked at David again. "Not my birthday."

"We don't know when your birthday _is,"_ Leo said. "And neither does Dad, 'cause it's classified. Come _on,_ we made you a cake!"

Still in shock, Frank allowed himself to be dragged over the lawn, nearly spilling the beer, but he did manage to make eye contact for about a half second with David before David looked away. Frank knew full damn well two pretty obvious things here. First of all, anyone who'd researched him in as much detail as David had wasn't going to overlook something as obvious as his goddamn birthday. Second, associating Frank Castle's birthday with Pete Castiglione was a little too close to hanging a neon sign over his head.

"So today is going to be your birthday," Leo finished triumphantly. "At least until you tell us what it really is."

"Those are the rules," Zach added.

"Oh, those are the rules? I guess I can't break the rules." He was on autopilot now, because he'd gotten a look at the cake, and the kids really _had_ made it, from the look of things, at least unless David and Sarah were completely incompetent bakers. It was lopsided, with frosting drooling onto the flowered plate it was sitting on, and an irregular array of candles tilted in various directions. Around the candles, HAPPY BIRTHDAY PETE had been written in looping blue icing.

"We didn't know how many candles to put on, either," Leo said. 

"Grownup birthdays have a _lot_ of candles," Zach confided. "We gave up after I guess about 20 or so."

Jesus Christ. He could see why David thought he needed a beer beforehand. He was tempted to just chug the whole thing if he hadn't been worried that it would push him right over the edge of his increasingly tenuous self-control. He looked helplessly at Sarah.

"Kids," Sarah said quickly, rounding them up, "why don't you light the candles for Fr -- for Pete? Leo, go get the lighter from the house. Zach, could you bring the plates? Oh, and we're going to need a cake server."

"Don't run with it!" David yelled after them.

"I thought David warned you," Sarah said quickly as soon as the kids were out of earshot.

"I did," David said.

Sarah shook a punch ladle at him. "I saw your text. That is not a warning, David. It's not even a heads up."

"It's okay," Frank said. "It's just kind of a ..." He looked at the lopsided cake again. Shit. He looked away. "This was really their idea?" It was easier to forgive the kids for this than the adults.

"It was entirely their idea," David said quickly. He rested a hand on Frank's shoulder and squeezed. Frank didn't mean to lean into it, but it was sort of hard not to. "Look, if you'd just come to a family dinner or something -- I mean, the kids talk about you all the time, and they got it somehow into their heads that you'd really like it if they did something like this. Leo made the cake from scratch, even. No boxes."

Jesus. He looked away from David, but there just wasn't anything to look at, except the fence.

"Look, if you're pissed, I get it --" David began.

"David," Sarah said, her voice strangely gentle. "He's not pissed. Keep the kids in the house for one more minute, would you?"

"Right. I, uh." David patted him on the shoulder and then vanished in the direction of the house, where he intercepted the kids coming out with handfuls of implements.

Sarah turned around and gripped Frank by the shoulders.

"Now, you listen to me," she said in an undertone. "The kids are really looking forward to this, and it's going to be okay, you hear me? You can do this. It's okay. If you need a little while, you can go in the house and David and I will make sure they don't bother you. But mostly, we're doing this because we _all_ want to, because you brought my husband back to us and saved his life, saved all of us, and you can't just walk away from that, you understand? Are you with me?"

"Yes, ma'am," Frank said, a slight hitch in his voice.

"Frank," she murmured, and wrapped her arms around him, hugging him with unexpected strength. He resisted for a stunned moment, then let her hug him, and turned his head to bury his face in her shoulder. 

"Are you okay?" she whispered into his ear.

"Gonna be," he whispered back, and was pretty sure he meant it.

 

*

 

So it wasn't a bad afternoon. Leo and Zach fought over who got to cut the cake, and ended up taking turns. There was a birthday card which (thank God for small favors) the kids had bought from a store, not made themselves; it had a joke on the front and Frank dutifully pretended to laugh at it. Then he blew out the candles and ate two lopsided pieces of cake followed by burgers halfassedly grilled on the back patio (it somehow didn't surprise him that David kept getting distracted; Frank ended up having to take over because _for fuck's sake_ ). As darkness fell soft and lush over the backyard, the kids got distracted with a game on Leo's phone, sprawling all over each other on the patio while the adults had a couple more beers and stars came out in the velvet, city-tinted sky.

"So I feel like we lured you here and I feel kind of bad about that," David said.

David had Sarah draped on his shoulder (Frank got the impression she'd either had a couple more drinks than either he or David had, or it was hitting her harder because of smaller body mass). And he remembered Sarah as he'd first known her, angry and brittle and all alone in her living room, talking about her grief, her despair; raising two kids by herself and grieving a dead husband who wasn't even dead. There wasn't a part of Frank that was even envious of this, somewhat to his own surprise. He was just so goddamn happy they were happy.

Maybe, after all of that, Pete Castiglione deserved to get a birthday, just once.

"It's all right," Frank said. "Your kids baked me a birthday cake; you didn't even make me a goddamn sandwich." 

David's hand twitched on his beer, a tiny flick of his middle finger where Sarah couldn't see it, followed by a grin. 

"So," Frank added, "when's _your_ birthday, anyhow?"

He got treated to a look of pure panic crossing David's face, and Sarah dissolved in giggles, with her arms draped around David's neck. Then Leo piped up from somewhere around their feet, where she was sprawled with Zach, "My bat mitzvah's in two months, are you going to be able to come?"

"Uh," Frank said. He looked at David and Sarah. "Am I allowed to do that?"

"Sure you are," David said, and reached for his beer. "Long as you bring her a present."

"I guess I am, sweetheart," Frank told her, and then the next thing came from some part of him that was pure Old Frank, before-everything Frank: "So if we're talking presents, you guys didn't get me anything?"

"Dad said no," Zach said. "He said grownups don't do that."

David gave Frank a look that clearly said _please don't kill me,_ and Frank thought about how awkward this entire day would have been if the kids had tried to give him presents, and offered him a shrug.

"This doesn't mean you're allowed to not bring a bat mitzvah present," Leo said loudly from under the table.

"Guess I just got told," Frank said to the adults.

"More beers?" David asked, and there were vague agreeing noises around the table. David started to get up, but Sarah patted his shoulder, kissed the top of his head, and got to her feet, vanishing into the house. David stared after her for a moment, then looked over at Frank.

"Hey," David said, and he nudged Frank across the table with the neck of his empty beer bottle. "You okay? I mean, really."

"Sure," Frank said, easily enough, but the thought crossed his mind that it might actually be true, maybe, just a little bit. In some ways. "Still want to know when your birthday is, though."

"No, I don't think you need that information."

"August ninth," Leo piped up from under the table.

"Traitor," David declared, and the kids broke out in giggles.

Frank leaned back in his chair, and he made himself not think about birthdays past, about his kids' cards hand-drawn with crayons and Maria's special birthday meatloaf. Because this was ... all right, it really was, a homemade cake with shitty icing and a storebought card and David's badly grilled burgers and the beers that Sarah was plunking around the table even now, along with a glass of wine for herself.

It was Pete Castiglione's first-ever birthday, and Frank thought it was, maybe, a pretty good one.


End file.
